An anonymous reader writes "Linux guru Alan Cox is taking a year off from RedHat and kernel development to get his MBA. For years, Alan Cox has maintained the extremely stable 2.2 Linux kernel, and more or less been Linux creator Linus Torvalds' right hand man. Now it sounds like the 2.2 kernel is up for grabs to someone who is 'good at refusing patches and being ignored'..."

Bingo Foo asks: "My company is in the process of reviewing replacements to our existing multi-platform VPN, which has now been discontinued. I was under the impression that every major vendor's OS ships with a VPN configuration solution. What gives? Are these not standard enough? Are they not secure enough? not flexible enough? Regardless, our IT department is leaning toward a clientless, web-based solution, which frankly sounds too good to be true. Can simply directing your browser at the portal allow X11, NFS, SMB, AFP, ssh, etc. transparently through the firewall? Anyone have experience with Neoteris and their VPN?"

celston23 writes "According to this article (near bottom), RedHat is intending to use their Open Source Now Fund to support open-source (GPL) developers who are sued for copyright infringement. Might be used during the SCO legal battle."

Adam Ernst asks: "I'm trying to build a low-end tablet PC type device for giving tests to students in a classroom. The touch screen TFT wasn't hard to get and the WiFi shouldn't be too hard either, but the most difficult part has been finding a motherboard! I tried Via's Mini-ITX, but it was too tall at about 1.5 inches. The motherboard needs to be just three quarters of an inch tall; the length and width can't exceed 8 inches each, but the smaller the better. No fans allowed--this has to be silent. The -only- requirements feature-wise are that it is able to connect to a TFT-LCD, has either USB, CompactFlash, or PCMCIA for WiFi, and has enough power to run Red Hat or SuSE (the only Linuxes my IDE supports). No ports, no ethernet, not even sound. Preferably it would take straight power (just one wire in and one out, at some set voltage) so I don't have to mess with power circuits. Of course, the most important factor of all is cost, since it's for schools (preferably less than $100 in small quantities ~90 units)."

GillBates0 writes "Yahoo/Reuters is reporting that Linux seems to be gaining over Microsoft in India. According to Red Hat, about 10 percent of India's personal computers will be sold with Linux rather than Microsoft operating systems by March, 2004, up from nothing in January. Linux already drives India's National Stock Exchange, and the Government of India has been promoting open source lately."

uninet writes "The SCO Group, Inc. today released a statement concerning the lawsuit filed against it yesterday by Red Hat, Inc. The release quotes Darl McBride, SCO's President and CEO, as being 'disappointed' with Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik for not being 'forthcoming' about Red Hat's intentions in a previous discussion." Reader psykocrime adds "According to this SuSE press release, SuSE has publically announced their support for RedHat's actions against SCO. Quoting from the press release: 'SCO has already been halted in Germany and we applaud Red Hat's actions to help end their activities in the US -- and beyond. We applaud their efforts to restrict the rhetoric of the SCO group -- and the FUD they are trying to instill -- and will determine quickly what actions SuSE can take to support Red Hat in their efforts.'" Read on for a few more links.

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has released a PR Newswire article stating that it intends to sue SCO Group to prove that it doesn't infringe any of SCO's intellectual property regarding the Red Hat Linux platform, and to hold it accountable for its actions and smear campaign. They've also announced the creation of a legal fund, to which they've pledged $1M US dollars to fight complaints such as these, called the 'Open Source Now' fund."

Mark Wielaard writes "The gcj team created a natively compiled build of the Eclipse IDE. The resulting binary starts up faster then with any traditional JVM since there is no virtual machine to initialize or slow byte code interpreter or just in time compiler involved. This means that gcj got a lot better since the last Slashdot story in December about gcj and Eclipse. Red Hat provides RPMs for easy installation. Footnotes has screenshots by Havoc Pennington of the Eclipse IDE with GTK+ widgets."

JofCoRe writes "Just got a message from the redhat watch list today, announcing the availability of a new beta, called "Severn". Some snippets from the announcement: What's its development status? "It doesn't seem too horrendously in flux. Difficult at this moment to make a specific diagnosis." Among other things, SEVERN has: a new graphical boot, GCC 3.3, an updated 2.4.21 kernel, updated Evolution and Mozilla, More information about the beta can be found at rhl.redhat.com. And the Release notes are found here. Looks like they have it currently labeled as v9.0.93." Update: 07/21 15:11 GMT by H : It's 3.2.3 GCC, not 3.3, as I had above.

Brindafella writes "Brindafella reports that Redhat is flying in space as the OS for Canada's Smallest Satellite: The Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment (CanX-1)[300k PDF], one of the flock of 1kg pico-satellites launched on 1 July 03 by a Russian rocket. Redhat eCos stands for embedded Configurable operating system, an open source real-time operating system (eCos Home Page). See the eCos Programmer's Guide for the CubeSat Computer: Introduction, Hardware Model, Development Setup, and Loading the eCos. The CANX-1 site at the University of Toronto, Canada gives more details, such as: The satellite is a 10cm cube, with a mass less than one kilogram; The satellite will generate about two Watts of peak power using direct energy conversion; Main Computer Board - Atmel AT91R40807 based on ARM7TDMI Thumb Processor, 40 MHz, 1 MB SRAM, 32 MB Flash, 200 mW max, 98 x 96 x 8 mm."

WirelessMan asks "I work for a certain university in the US, and our IT department has just deployed IEEE 802.1x authentication for our wireless network. One of the benefits is that all users' sessions are encrypted using tumbling WEP keys. One of the (major) drawbacks is the 'newness' of 1x. As far as I can tell (Google, etc) there aren't a whole lot of places out there who have taken the plunge. Google it, or check out this brief description. Does the Slashdot community have any experience with 1x?"

Anonymous Coward writes "Finally, a much awaited review of enterprise OSes. The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin on the basis of its high hardware compatibility and strong security integration."

hobsonchoice writes "SCO has issued a letter saying SCO Linux customers won't be sued. The same does not seem to apply if using a non-SCO distribution such as RedHat." LightSail points to the SCO letter itself, and raises an interesting point: "If they approve the use of 'their' IP in Linux in a single kernel, then the GPL holds that IP SCO allows to be used by a select few must be freely released to any and all. It appears that all Linux users everywhere were just given a license to continued use of Linux even if SCO would win their suit with IBM." And Haikuu writes "eWeek recently posted an interview conducted by e-mail exchange with Linus Torvalds regarding his recent move to the OSDL and the SCO suit."

SPK writes "A colleague and I recently discussed how New Riders's most highly regarded book -- Paul DuBois's MySQL -- corresponds to O'Reilly's worst dud: MySQL & mSQL. Charles Bookman's Linux Clustering does nothing to improve New Riders's reputation. The book is divided into eleven chapters, unevenly distributed among three sections: an overview of clustering for Linux, building clusters, and maintaining clusters. Four appendices provide brief information about online clustering resources, options for RedHat's 'Kickstart,' options for DHCP, and information on 'Condor ClassAd Machine Attributes.'" To find out why Krause was so displeased with this book, read on below for his review.

Dan Clough writes "I read this book to improve my knowledge of Linux networking, and in that regard it was a huge success! It was also an enjoyable and easy-to-read book. I am pretty much a Linux beginner, and know 'enough to be dangerous.' My existing home LAN consists of 5 machines: one running Mandrake Linux 9.1, one RedHat 9 (laptop), two Windows XP, and one Windows 98. These are connected to a commercial (Siemens Speedstream) router/switch and share internet access via a cable modem. All the computers can communicate with each other and share files, using Samba. The router also functions as a print-server for a laser printer, which the Linux machines print to via CUPS." Whether your network is bigger, smaller, or hypothetical, Dan's review (below) suggests that O'Reilly's Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition would be useful to have at hand as you build or troubleshoot. Read on for the rest.

Bruha writes "Lewt over at Warcry News Network has written his review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's."

Jonathan Larmour points out the "release of eCos 2.0, the configurable RTOS for the deeply embedded market. This release features a new licence based on the GPL, but with an exception to make it more suitable for embedded use. It's also now an independent free software project from the original developers Red Hat (which bought Cygnus Solutions) after the development team was canned. Most of the team still work on eCos but for different companies. It also has a wide range of ports but has managed to keep a low profile, which should now change with the new stable release. More at http://ecos.sourceware.org/ "

You asked nmap creator Fyodor many excellent questions, and his answers (below) are just as excellent. You'll want to set aside significant time to read and digest this interview, because Fyodor didn't just toss off a few words, but put some real time and energy into his answers.

MoreDruid asks: "Not long ago, I was asked to do some research for a blind relative from a friend of mine. I tried searching the sites of Red Hat, Debian, and some other distro's, but only SuSe came up with really useful information. I did find Blinux, but I think it's not really mature yet. Do any other Slashdotters have any experience in this field? What is a good distro to start with? This research is geared towards a blind newbie user, so are there any decent resources for vision impaired people so that he can get going with Linux?" This topic was discussed, in a more general sense, some two years ago, and there have since been questions dealing with several pieces of the puzzle. However, is there anything else out there, aside from the developing Blinux, that puts it all together in one nice package?

An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."